Collaborative Student Research with Google Drive: Advantages and Challenges

During the 2013-2014 academic year, the presenter and USD’s theology librarian tried a pedagogical experiment that relied heavily on Google Drive. Its shared spaces and associated applications served a variety of purposes, especially research collaboration between students and between students and the professor. Placed in research working groups across sections, students augmented and annotated shared bibliographies in Google doc format. Notes often included local call numbers, loan status, links to e-books or full-text articles, and specific feedback about the research value of each source. Into a shared, personal Google drive folder, each student (and the professor as a fellow/model researcher) uploaded weekly research notes, a three-slide presentation, and an accompanying 100 word presentation. Thus students benefited from seeing the research and presentations of others throughout the semester and, in effect, constantly challenged each other to do better work each week. The implementation of Google Drive, however, took considerable time and energy and presented issues regarding sharing permissions (especially from spam filters that prevented sharing with a lot of email addresses), space limitations, and even, surprisingly, student usability.